The last time I saw Paris / Her heart was warm and gay
I heard the laughter of her heart / In every street café
Jerome Kern
Forget Paris? Since the “F-word” made it’s indelible appearance in feature films not too many years ago the reality of everyday speech has been a problem for producers getting to the money that is blocked by that PG-13 rating because of “strong language.” This caused many a 13-year-old to protest with the blistering scatology of Joe Pesci in Goodfellas The answer? Dub the word “forget” wherever the “F-word” appears and, voila , a new rating! So, are 13-year-olds going around telling their parents “ forget you, dad!” and “this dinner forgettingsucks, mom!” And are rappers rapping on about how many “ motherforgetters” they have shot? No forgetting way, man.
There may have been other motivations for Billy Crystal naming his film Forget Paris (1995), unless, like some of those Midwestern package tourists who have asked a Parisian waiter how to get to Notre Dame and ended up closer to the one with the football team, he has had a dark experience in the City of Lights. But, if you’ve seen Casablanca , you know that even an experience in Paris that goes sour can be unforgettable. [1] Some of my own unforgettable (at least by me) experiences in Paris over several years are recorded in these pages [20.1, 18.7, 5.13, 4.12, 4.9. 4.2, and 2.5], but I’m mentally re-visiting Paris this time through the memories of Stanley Karnow.
Paris is often referred to by its “ages”:medieval Paris, the Paris of St. Louis, Paris in the Terror, Belle Epoque Paris, The Paris of the Lost Generation. Then there is that post WWII Paris of The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954) with Liz Taylor and Van Johnson romping around the wehrmacht -vacated streets. [2] It was a heady time, halcyon days, some might say, when Parisians still loved Yanks for a while and the old cafés that Hemingway and Fitzgerald used to hang at were again available for the next generation of aspiring ex-pat writers. This is the time Karnow evokes so well because his book draws upon the lengthy dispatches he sent to New York as a young reporter for Time magazine during the fifties. A lot of what he wrote ended up on the “cutting room floor” at Time’s offices, but has been swept up into Paris in the Fifties in a way that feels very vivid and current.
Karnow went to Paris on what was to be a brief European backpack after graduating from Harvard and ended up there for nine years, along the way turning his schoolboy Français to a fluency that allowed him to research stories and conduct interviews with many of the famous and infamous of the time. Karnow, great journalist that he is, [3] never gets in the way of stories even, despite his extra-journalistic associations, with many of his subjects. They include the fifties generation of William Burroughs, Brendan Behan, Otto Friedrich, and James Baldwin, among a number of French literati and political figures.
One learns that a Time correspondent gets to interview and hang out with the prevailing gourmands (Cournonsky), intellectuals (Malraux), political figures who flew across the secular French firmament, such as the right-winger, Pierre Poujade, whose acolyte at the time (and who barely receives a mention) was an Indochina veteran named Jean Marie Le Pen, and couturiers like Dior. Karnow grounds these stories in historical material that is equally interesting in helping us try to understand the French. Many people might know that Louis XIV used to invited lesser royalty into his morning toilet to watch him make his morning merde , and then give one of them the privilege of wiping his royal derriere ; but how many of you know that Ho Chi Minh (who did not go by that name at the time) once served as a pastry chef for the renowned George-Auguste Escoffier (would you like to try our new croissant stuffed with C-4, monsieur?).
Although my own time in Paris has been far briefer than Karnow’s I felt a kinship with him when after, a couple of years there, he could write a sentence like: “After a while, I began to feel, a Time subscriber might conclude that, by and large, France was a degenerate nation of gourmets, adulterers, leftist intellectuals and volatile politicians who could not prevent their government from collapsing every few months.” It’s that sort of familiarity one gets with a foreign culture that such stereotypes do not ring true when they are invoked, but one can never quite write them out of the subtext.
Sometimes that is difficult to do. A dear French friend of mine used to instruct me gently, and without the slightest tinge of snobbery or superiority, that with the particular wine she had opened we must have cet specific frommage, cet specific pain, and finish it all off with a Gauloise cigarette (or was that a Gitane?). This is what the French call le savior-vivre, knowing how to live (as long as it’s not too many of those Gauloise, or was it Gitane?). Perhaps the French [4] must be experienced to be appreciated, but Karnow gets you about as close to that as one can be without “being there.”
Forget Paris? How could Karnow ever do that; he met his first and second (current?) wife there. I won’t ever forget Paris either; over the years I have been there when her heart was “warm and gay” and when it felt a bit more froid. An outsider might never get into their le savior-vivre they way they do, but would the French, and particularly those Parisians, be as much fun to write about, or as interesting, any other way? [5]
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©2005, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 11.10.2005)
[1] What?! You haven’t seen Casablanca ? Where the hell have you been, in the witness protection program in Borneo? “This could be the end of a beautiful friendship.” Rent it.
[2] What?! You haven’t seen The Last Time I Saw Paris and hummed that haunting melody for a week? Rent it when you rent Casablanca. There’ll be a quiz on Monday
[3] Karnow is a multiple Pulitzer Prize journalist and author of what many regard as the best book on the Vietnam war.
[4] The Parisians are often considered a separate breed from the French in general and the latter cohort can react to their compatriots in the capitol the way those American Midwesterners react to Parisian waiters.
[5] I also highly recommend Sanche De Gramont, The French (1969) if you can locate a copy. I read it before I went to Paris as a visiting professor in 1989 and it saved me a faux-pas , ordeux .